The Render conference, 21-22 April, that took place in Oxford, was an incredible experience! I’ve learnt so many new cool things and met amazing people. The opening speaker was Bruce Lawson (@brucel), deputy CTO at Opera, who gave a very funny and entertaining talk on the challenges that the web is facing, in particular – native apps. Where web lost the battle against native is… Read More

How’s my final year project going? I know it’s crazy, 2 weeks away from the submission deadline, I am writing a blog post about it. But I am travelling, so I have no Internet access and I felt like writing. My report already exceeds 20,000 words and I am extremely happy with the literature review section. I am discussing the current state of higher education… Read More

This weekend has been an amazing experience! 24 hours of non stop coding and fun. The Facebook team offered us the most amazing time, with great food (all the time), drinks, snacks, music and raffles, everything you ever wanted. I met my team on the day and we quickly brainstormed ideas before the hack officially started around 12:30 on Saturday. I was very keen on… Read More

On International Women’s Day, I have been invited to talk about my passion for computing science and the topic of women in computing at my University’s event “Celebrating Women in STEM”. It has been a pleasure to speak on behalf of the newly formed Women in Computing society, which has great prospects! I am happy to hear from third and second year undergraduates, who show… Read More

Last Friday I have been lucky enough to obtain a scholarship to attend the EnhanceConf. Based on the concept of progressive enhancement in web development, the conference was the first of its kind and gather a set of incredibly good speakers. The principle of progressive enhancement encourages developers to first build applications that are simple and have great performance on any device and browser, even… Read More

I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone who struggles to stay focused on their work right now. Cal Newport analyses and coins the term of deep work, a skill that is mastered by only a few nowadays, but is of extremely high value in our economy. As a final year undergraduate student, I could easily see how deadlines for projects, exams, as well as… Read More

Yesterday I’ve been on a super trip organised by my University’s Computing&Engineering department to the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park. I’ve visited the Bletchley Park a year ago and I found it really interesting – all the Enigma machines, stories about the female codebreakers and Alan Turing. Everything was really inspiring. However, I didn’t visit the computing museum, which is right behind the… Read More

As part of my Distributed Client Server Systems class, this term I am learning about using CORBA, a widely used middleware object broker. They are used in object oriented client-server systems and allow an object on one machine to call a method of an object found on another machine (client-server). So far, in the first 4 weeks of the term, we tackled IDL (Interface Definition… Read More

After spending 2-3 weeks on writing up the platform’s user requirements and designing the architecture, I decided it is high time to start developing something! I will focus in the first month on making sure the video player implements the dash.js library very well, adaptive streaming is applied correctly in conjunction with Amazon Web Services – S3 and Cloudfront as CDN. In March I’ll look… Read More

So, I am creating a prototype of a MOOC platform, I am addressing online video streaming optimisation for central Africa. So far so good. But what about the actual videos? I can’t download or copy courses from other higher education institutions or MOOC platforms. There are copyright issues and I wouldn’t like to upset anybody. I’ll definitely won’t be able to create good content myself…. Read More